I am sure that in the next 18 – 36 months we will increasingly see that large corporations use the web to drive down costs for customer service  while at the same providing the same or an even improved customer service experience.

One approach to provide online customer service are online communities. These have emerged around companies and their products together with discussion forums have long been a source for customers to get answers to their questions without the need to interact with the company directly.

One example is crackberry.com, an independent site about the BlackBerry smartphone that has already 30% of the visitors that the original Blackberry.com site has (see compete.com statistics). From my own experience the crackberry.com forum is a really valuable and helpful source for customer service.

While many of these sites are independent and do not represent an organization, companies increasingly understand the potential of online communities to offer customer service. 

The New York Times has published an article titled “Customer Service? Ask A Volunteer” which explains the story, motivation and success factors of a online community for customer services that has been created by Verizon.

Mr. McMurry is part of an emerging corps of Web-savvy helpers that large corporations, start-up companies and venture capitalists are betting will transform the field of customer service.

[…] Verizon needed to find a smart way to try to tap into that potential resource for customer service.

In talking to people and surveying the research on voluntary online communities, Verizon concluded that super-users would be crucial to success.

There is also a statement from Verizon about the success of the experiment.

At Verizon, Mr. Studness says he is pleased with the experiment so far. He calls the company-sponsored customer-service site “a very productive tool,” partly because it absorbs many thousands of questions that would otherwise be expensive calls to a Verizon call center.

Read the full article “Customer Service? Ask A Volunteer” in the New York Times.

An article in the Wall Street Journal from September 2008 titled “Making the Most of Customer Complaints” from Prof. Stefan Michel, IMD Lausanne, David Bowen, Thunderbird School of Global Management and Robert Johnston, Warwick Business School summarizes challenges and strategies to ensure the successful management of customer complaints.

Here is an excerpt:

Nobody’s perfect. That’s a fact, not an excuse. Which is why it’s crucial for companies to realize that the way they handle customer complaints is every bit as important as trying to provide great service in the first place. Because things happen.

Customers are constantly judging companies for service failures large and small, from a glitch-ridden business-software program to a hamburger served cold. They judge the company first on how it handles the problem, then on its willingness to make sure similar problems don’t happen in the future. And they are far less forgiving when it comes to the latter. Fixing breakdowns in service — we call this service recovery — has enormous impact on customer satisfaction, repeat business, and, ultimately, profits and growth.

But unfortunately, most companies limit service recovery to the staff who deal directly with customers. All too often, companies have customer service sort out the immediate problem, offer an apology or some compensation, and then assume all is well. This approach is particularly damaging because it does nothing to address the underlying problem, practically guaranteeing similar failures and complaints.

Read the full article “Making the Most of Customer Complaints”.

Influencing Images

The images and situations depicted in many medical TV series create the wrong expectations in patients which lead to disappointment and negative experiences during their stay in a hospital. The scenes depicted in medical TV series are set to create engaging stories and increase viewer numbers and are not necessarily meant to reflect reality. That’s the reason why doctors are carrying the infusion bag next to the patients bed by themselves, show no reluctance when they are called to the hospital at most uncommon times and are in general extraordinarily committed, generous, competent and patient-oriented.

Frequent TV viewers have higher expectations

Kai Witzel, a German doctor, interviewed patients about their television viewing behavior and their satisfaction with the time spent by medical doctors, service and general experience. He found out that patients who regularly follow medical TV series and think that the scenes shown in these TV series reflect the reality of hospital operations are significantly less satisfied with the time doctors and nurses have spent with them. Additionally they rated the satisfaction with doctors lower than those that prefer game or quiz shows. These patients also believe that the scenes in medical TV series do not reflect reality.

The Implications for Doctors

It becomes increasingly important that doctors not only focus on the outcome of patient treatment but also on the atmosphere and experience that is created while interacting with patients. And it becomes increasingly important to understand your patients – and the amount of medical TV series that they watch – in order to provide a remarkable patient experience. I wonder which hospital will be the first to ask patients whether they watch a lot of medical TV series in order to provide differentiated services to these customers.

The Implications for other Industries

Remarkable customer experiences are the result of delivering an experience that exceeds a customer’s expectations. The most important task that companies have to do is to understand customer expectations and how they differ in between different customers. The key is then to deliver on and exceed these customer expectations with differentiated but customized products and services.

Further Links (Only available in German):

• Arztbild in den Medien: Dr. Stefan Frank hätte sich mehr Zeit genommen
• Einfluss des Fernsehkonsums auf die Angst vor einer Operation

Adam Galinsky, a social psychologist at Northwestern University, reported about an exercise (see article "Your Boss Really is Clueless")that one could perform to find out the degree of empathy. Just ask somebody to draw a letter on his or her forehead. In which direction does it face? Is it written so that you can read it? Or is it written so that others can read it?

More than a decade of experiments have shown that people who write the E in a way that is legible to themselves but backwards to others have not thought or cared about how others might perceive the letter. On the other hand, people who draw the E backward to them but legible to others have considered another’s point of view.

Still, this is a nice exercise, how do you make empathic employee behavior real? How can empathy contribute for a remarkable customer experience?

Xavier from Notebooks.com provides a great example of a concrete manifestation of empathic employees providing extraordinary customer service. He shares his story of a broken Apple MacBook Pro and how he was treated in the Apple Store.

I was greeted by a very friendly Swiss Apple employee who was on his last day of training in the U.S. before returning to Zurich to help open a new Apple store. […] Obviously my MacBook Pro has already had its fair share of downtime and I don’t think it’s reasonable for a notebook to be subject to three major repairs within the first four months of purchase. He said he completely understood my frustration and asked one of the Genius Bar managers to assist.

The Genius Bar manager then asked me something that I’ve NEVER heard before from any computer customer service person. “What would be a satisfactory solution for you?,” he asked.

That might seem like a simple question, but it’s something that more companies should ask to resolve customers’ issues. It shows that they’re actually trying to solve your problem rather than just run you through their standard operating procedures.

I told him that all I wanted was to walk out of the store with a machine that I could count on and not have bring back for yet another repair. […]

This single question is such a powerful statement and shows that employees care about the customer and that he is taken serious. They are interested in the customer’s opinion and the desired outcome that he imagines.

But wait? What if I cannot deliver the customer’s desired solution?

Well there is always the risk that you might not be able to deliver your customer’s desired solution and meet his expectations, explain why you are not able to deliver the solution. If you have valid arguments, your customers will understand. However, without asking him directly, you always have to guess what the solution might be and the process towards a solution is much more complicated.

What are the implications for your organization?

There are probably extensive handbooks and trainings for “front-line” employees in your organization. They might include guidelines about replacement policies, dress code, and how employees should talk with customer, just to name a few. If these handbooks include the guideline to ask the question “What would be a satisfactory solution for you?” you are already on the right path, if they don’t include it then it is time to update your handbooks and training manuals.

Read  the full article My Apple Curse Strikes Again, but Apple Store Saves the Day

Read the full article Your Boss Really is Clueless or the complete research paper "Power and Perspectives Not Taken".

Examples can be found at airports (check in counters), train stations (ticket counters), banks (ATMs and Internet banking) and even in selected McDonalds restaurants where you are able to order your BigMac with a self-service terminal in a restaurant.

Many customers prefer self-service over traditional service interfaces because when working properly they help to save time. When you look at it holistically, a service designer should try to reduce the number of human interactions to increase the efficiency of a service system. But while focusing on continuously increasing efficiency, service designers should not forget about effectiveness.

When “human services” fail, there is usually somebody around who could at least help you. If a self-service system fails, there is nobody around who might help (that’s the point of self-service) and customers are usually lost. Obviously you should design for self-service failures but not everyone is doing it. But how do “smart” companies solve that problem? By assigning employees that help customers with the self-service system.

Three of my personal experiences with such “workarounds” were at the Swiss Air check-in counters in Zurich, Deutsche Bahn (German railways) ticket counter in Cologne and United Airlines check-in counters in San Francisco. Why would you put a “half-baked” self-service terminal there, when you know that you probably need employees that can help customer’s to use them?

If you want to make a difference, first you have to ensure that you do everything possible to prevent self-service failures (a.k.a. user testing, user testing, user testing). Additionally you have to plan for self-service failures and design for self-service recovery through the self-service terminal.Designing a self-service terminal with “human backup” is only the last solution. If designer ignore this and something goes wrong, your customers will be lost and without any recovery efforts they will become ambassadors of negative word of mouth.

Image courtesy of [HippiHippo]

One challenge for organizations is that it is difficult to control what is happening outside their sphere of influence on blogs, forums or social networks.

Dell Hell is just one of these examples when the angry voice of customers has run out of control. The term coined by Jeff Jarvis to describe the horrible service he experienced from Dell Computers, has received a lot of attention, especially since at the time when he posted the number of customers frustrated with Dell’s customer service reach record-breaking heights.

What can a company do about these public complaints that might start an avalanche of negative publicity?

It is necessary to create a platform that gives customers a possibility to complain on the Internet. This should not just be possible in a private way (such as a complaint submission form), but instead in a public way with representatives from this organization working and documenting their efforts to fix the problem.

After the "Dell Hell" fiasco, Dell has established a few quite innovative concepts to deal with customer complaints on the Internet. Dell Community Pulse allows you to state your problem and post your tone (compliment, comment, complaint) together with a message. Take all complaints submitted to Dell globally and the result is a real time thermometer of their customer’s mood.

Complaints dominate the current mood; one reason is that such a website is always biased because of a self-selection of customers who prefer to complain rather than to compliment.

Nevertheless, such a platform creates transparency where an organization has problems, but it is also a way to show that an organization is taking unsatisfied customers serious and is not afraid to show the current state of customer satisfaction.

Even more important is that such a platform attracts people who would otherwise complain on platforms out of Dell’s control. Most customers do not want to harm an organization; they just want to be heard. That is why they write on blogs.

Providing an open, (semi-) transparent channel for your customers can help you to attract customer complaints and at least partially keep negative word-of-mouth in control.

The “service recovery paradox” states that with a highly effective service recovery, a service or product failure offers a chance to achieve higher satisfaction ratings from customers than if the failure had never happened. A little bit less academically, this means that a good recovery can turn angry and frustrated customers into loyal customers. In fact it can create even more goodwill than if things had gone smoothly in the first place.

Nevertheless not all service recovery efforts will lead to increased satisfaction ratings as several studies have already shown. The key is to understand that there are certain situations when it is highly likely that a service recovery will lead to increased customer satisfaction. Services recoveries that are likely to be efficient are obviously those where the service failure is perceived to be not systematic or that the company had little control over it. But even in cases when it was a systematic failure and the company had control over the failure there is benefit for when service recovery activities are put into action to ensure that one can win-back customer’s and the source of failure is eliminated.

The key question is this: Are you aware when your customers encounter service failures? Have you thought about an “emergency plan” that can be put in action whenever your customers encounter a service failure? Or do you plan to take ad-hoc action when customers end their business relationship with you?

Read more about the service recovery paradox in these publications:

VP Magnini et. al., “The service recovery paradox: justifiable theory or smoldering myth?,” Journal of Services Marketing 21, no. 3 (2007): 213-225.

CA de Matos, JL Henrique, und C Alberto Vargas Rossi, “Service Recovery Paradox: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Service Research 10, no. 1 (2007): 60.

The names on our second annual list of Customer Service Champs know how to keep front-line folks happy, make tech investments that help rather than hinder consumers and have leaders who make service a priority. See a full explanation of how we chose the winners, and to have your own say. This year, we’re letting readers help to reorder the top 10 names on our list.

They shortly write about the details of the winners: USAA, Fairmont Hotels and ACE Hardware. Here is the list of the Top 10 companies, the full list can be found here.

1. USAA
2. L.L.Bean
3. Fairmont Hotels & Resorts
4. Lexus
5. Trader Joe’s
6. Starbucks
7. Jetblue Airways
8. Edward Jones
9. Lands’ End
10. ACE Hardware

Read the complete special report.